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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Everything is New Again - backing up Gmail

In January of 2008 Charter Communications accidentally deleted thousands of email accounts. In December of 2006 Google accidentally had deleted 60 gmail accounts. Here's a January 2008 post of mine explaining how to backup gmail with Pop3.

However, it is important to note...Google didn't lose the email permanently. As they have explained

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.

Google's offline tape backup is very reassuring to this customer. I am not one of the .02% of Gmail customers who woke up a couple days ago to empty accounts. You would have heard from me if I had been. While it may be possible to imagine a natural disaster that might impact both the backup servers and the tape backup simultaneously, I am comforted that they are not relying completely on digital storage.